“The Queen of Versailles”

Rating: PG

When: Opens Friday

Where: Landmark Hillcrest

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

★★

When the economy tanked four years ago, many Americans discovered they were living an illusion, instead of the American dream; their precious homes divvied up among nameless bankers demanding money that they never really had. Lauren Greenfield’s freak show of a documentary, “The Queen of Versailles,” depicts this tale of financial rug-pulling on a ludicrous scale — only it’s plenty more entertaining when the subjects look right into the camera and practically beg for payback.

Greenfield was as caught off guard by the 2008 economic collapse as her exorbitantly wealthy subjects, Jackie and David Siegel. The couple first caught the filmmaker’s attention in 2007 because of the Orlando palace they were constructing for themselves, modeled after Versailles and the top two floors of Las Vegas’ Paris hotel. At 90,000 square feet, it also promised to be the largest single-family home in the United States.

As founder of the largest privately held timeshare company in the country, 74-year-old David Siegel made many millions aggressively shilling tiny slices of resort life to any budget vacationer gullible enough to sign up for a presentation in exchange for free tickets to Disney World or a Vegas show, an unsettling process the company unwisely allows Greenfield to document. Instead of socking some of that money away to ensure security for his family, which includes his 43-year-old third wife, Jackie, a former model with a spending problem and her head in the sand, and seven children ranging from teenagers to toddlers, David put every dime back into the business, building ever taller timeshare towers and pushing his flimsy take on the American dream to people who couldn’t afford it — until he couldn’t afford it either.

What was originally intended to be a documentary about a cardboard couple’s erection of a shrine to Donald Trump and his design aesthetic quickly becomes a tragicomic indulgence of schadenfreude with the sophistication of a Kardashian reality show. Sure, the Siegels’ financial downfall has some poetic justice, but what is it worth if no lesson is learned, on camera or even after the film’s Sundance premiere, when David filed a flimsy defamation lawsuit against the director and the film’s distributors?

The sinister joy you might feel is purposefully tainted by the fallout from the Siegels’ financial folly; thousands of people out of work, a gaggle of spoiled Siegel children stranded with nothing but a sense of entitlement, the family’s kind Filipina nannies, who gave up the chance to have their own families in order to care for — and love — the Siegel children, on the chopping block. But there’s still plenty to snicker at, thanks to Jackie’s oblivious antics and cleavage-baring wardrobe that belie her lack of sophistication.

The sum total of this calamity of a family is sickening. But then again, so are car crashes, celebrity murder trials and the majority of reality shows on television, all of which cause large numbers of people to stop and stare with some combination of horror, pleasure and voyeuristic curiosity. “The Queen of Versailles” appeals to this most base human instinct; it will make you gasp in disbelief at the sheer audacity of the Siegels’ greed, laugh at their lunacy and cringe at their casual willingness to live in a mansion littered with piles of dog poop.

But what it doesn’t do, despite trying to convince you otherwise, is enrich the conversation that this country should be having about its financial system, attitudes toward material wealth and the future of the American dream.

Alison Gang is the U-T’s movie critic. Email her at alison@alisongang.com.